Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT We Are The Table
By Jacob Clifton | Season 4 | Episode 13 | Aired on 09.08.2008
Till returns to his office a different man, blinking back vomit. He orders Dean out of the room, threatening to throw him through the window. Nancy's comforting mutters turn to shocked silence when he tosses Dean bodily out into the bullpen; she can feel the shift in the wind. Who is this new person? How can she work him? "My partner is dead," he says; his face is a skull with candles for eyes. Her jaw drops and he continues: they found Schlatter's body hanging on the border fence, without a fucking face. She's most shocked by that, the brutality of it, the implications about Esteban and Cesar. How Schlatter got what she wants most, facelessness. And the only cost is her conscience.
Till leans on the back of his chair, staring at her, demanding again and again to know who owns the tunnel, Guillermo's boss, the "fucking animal" that did this. She swears she was firmly entrenched on "this side" of the tunnel, and doesn't know; Guillermo is hustled past in a prisoner's jumpsuit, face newly bloodied, nearly unrecognizable. Till's knuckles are covered in his blood. Till explains that he's going after this man, and he's going to kill him. After, of course, he kills everyone the man loves -- Nancy gulps -- and he's doing this on his own, off the clock. "And if I find out you made me go the long way, I'm going to kill you too." Nancy stares deep into those mad eyes and he answers her unspoken interrogation with a new twist on an earlier phrase: "He was my partner." Nancy's eyes close softly, and she breathes, and she gets it. She just traded his lover for hers, and now everybody's going to die.
Celia has found her way to Mexico in a hilarious hat; she speaks Racist Spanglish at a woman for awhile -- interrupting herself to mention to nobody, "That chicken just sneezed on me" -- and the woman gives her a bunch of carrots. Cut to Celia riding like a queen in a donkey-drawn cart, driver asking if she's Kathleen Turner-slash-Joan Wilder, and she admits that she is Kathleen Turner, but not to tell anybody because she's researching a role. (Which is awesome for many reasons. One: Moonlight & Valentino. Two: Elizabeth Perkins is Kevin Bacon. Three: Kathleen Turner has become a dangerous psychopath, while Elizabeth Perkins only plays one on TV.) On the famous actress tip, the donkey driver mentions that the donkey currently dragging them toward Celia's daughter Quinn was once an actor himself. Sadly, he was replaced when his cojones became muy droopy. Barf me out. Celia drawls, "Ah. Time is cruel..." and then spots Quinn, looking lovely and refreshed, sitting at a picnic table, smiling shyly as they drive up.